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... What is RSS?Ok, I’ve taken my head out of the sand, started writing more, been working on getting new clients and overall it seems to be working.
I have had more calls from “potential clients” and have been, I think, helpful in answering their questions and solving their problems. Getting them to pay is another story altogether.
A good example of this occurred over the weekend – a Holiday Weekend – when I got a desparate phone call. Well, it was a series of short phone calls because “Silver” was having touble booting her system up to Windows. She apparently got my information through a Google search where she found my MCBS post about booting problems.
Long story short… I offered her some suggestions on how to boot up her system. She tried each one and none seemed to work so I told her she might have to reinstall her Windows XP from scratch and guess what? She had NO installation disk, NO recovery disk, NO backup and couldn’t start Windows in Safe Mode.
I mentioned to her that I could probably find a way to recover her hard drive with what disks she did have, but it would take some time and I would have to charge her. When I asked for her e-mail address to send her a bill for the additional help… “Click”. Not even a thank you.
I wasn’t even going to charge her for the hour I took out of my Holiday to try to help her, only for the additional time it would take to get her system up and running.
So, Lesson Learned.
I plan on getting ALL pertinent information up front, not just the persons name, but also any billing information that may be needed later.
How would you have handled an emergency call for your services on a Holiday Weekend? Do you always get the billing information up front?
